Switzerland has has a long history in space exploration. It was one of the ten founding members of the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1975 and remains an active member to this day. Stakeholders from academia (UniBE, ETHZ, EPFL, UZH, FHNW, UNIGE, UniLU) and industry work in countless fields, ranging from technology and software development to basic research. The resulting Swiss space ecosystem is characterized by a wide variety of expertise and specializations. Examples include the University of Bern’s solar sail (the first experiment on the Moon), the propulsion systems developed by Maxon for the Mars rover Perseverance, and, of course, the Nobel Prize awarded to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery of exoplanets.

The FHNW is not aiming for a Nobel Prize ☺︎. Nevertheless, since 2002, it has succeeded in establishing a serious space research program. This program is characterized by close, on-site interdisciplinary collaboration between the technology-, software-, data engineering-, and physics teams. For projects involving hardware HSI works with the FHNW School of Engineering and Environment HTU and their labs located on the same campus. Intense cooperation with the Swiss space industries contributes to the success. In the field of heliophysics, the FHNW also conducts basic research. As early as the 2000s, the FHNW was working on applied AI using machine learning methods. This was possible because open-source training data from space projects was freely available.

The FHNW’s flagship project is the X-ray telescope STIX, which has been orbiting the Sun aboard ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft since 2021. STIX (Sun) and the University of Bern’s Cheops satellite (exoplanets) are the only Swiss space instruments in orbit to date. The space telescope was designed and built at the FHNW by an international team led by Säm Krucker. The flight software and the data analysis software were also developed in-house. The FHNW’s heliophysics team now uses data from STIX and other space telescopes to conduct world-leading research on solar flares.

Other major projects in which the FHNW is involved include the space telescope Euclid, the Square Kilometer Array (SKAO)—the largest planned ground-based telescope—and various other research projects in the fields of astroinformatics, space sciences and heliophysics. As space-related activities were being established at the FHNW, new methods and formats for public engagement were developed.

Students interested in space have the opportunity to be part of the team and work on real space projects for their semester-, bachelor- or master projects. PhD students do their research at FHNW in partnership with ETH or other universities.